


Lovely, Dark, and Deep

by sahiya



Series: Equal Partners [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Snow and Ice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-19
Updated: 2010-01-19
Packaged: 2017-10-06 11:20:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sahiya/pseuds/sahiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Giles paused, leaned on his ski poles, and surveyed the tracks the slayer had left in the snow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lovely, Dark, and Deep

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Giles round at [](http://community.livejournal.com/hetfic_minis/profile)[**hetfic_minis**](http://community.livejournal.com/hetfic_minis/) for [](http://cala-jane.livejournal.com/profile)[**cala_jane**](http://cala-jane.livejournal.com/). Many thanks to [](http://fuzzyboo03.livejournal.com/profile)[**fuzzyboo03**](http://fuzzyboo03.livejournal.com/) and [](http://antennapedia.livejournal.com/profile)[**antennapedia**](http://antennapedia.livejournal.com/) for beta reading. Prompt at the end. _Very_ slight spoilers for the S8 comics.

Giles paused, leaned on his ski poles, and surveyed the tracks the slayer had left in the snow. The snow was freshly fallen and untouched, thus the prints were very clear - four inches deep, small, evenly spaced. No deeper ones that might indicate she'd stopped to rest. She had a good head start on them and was running at a pace she could maintain indefinitely, even in such cold. She'd be slower on foot than they were on skis, but he was getting tired, and even with the moon high and full in the sky, spilling stark white light everywhere, it was hard to see where he was going.

Faith paused ahead of him - he'd given her the job of forging the tracks, since she had far more energy to spare and would only get impatient with him for holding her up otherwise. She looked back and he sighed, planting his ski poles into the snow. They'd started out across the lake at the town and skied around the edge before venturing across two bays, frozen solid and packed with snow. It was past one in the morning now; they'd been moving since five that afternoon, when they'd knocked on Margaret's door. Giles didn't know how she'd known who they were, but by the time they'd finally talked their way past her father, she was long gone. Renting the skis had slowed them down in the short-term, but gave them some hope of actually catching up to her.

"Jesus," Faith said, as Giles finally caught up to her. "What is this chick's problem?"

Giles shook his head and rubbed his eyes with one gloved hand. "I don't pretend to know what it's like to grow up in her situation, but she's lived her entire life on a reservation. I doubt that when the authorities came calling it was ever good news."

"Whatever. I'm not an authority."

"Er," Giles said, "I hate to be the one to break it to you -"

"Don't be then. Shit." He heard her pick her pole up and then thump it back down into the snow. "Anyway, I thought they were the authorities around here - all the stuff I read before we came said 'tribal council this,' 'tribal council that.'"

"Ostensibly. I don't know how things work in reality."

"Ah, right. One sucktastic system is pretty much like every other. Almost forgot."

"Goodness. Did you perhaps suffer from a burst of optimism?"

"Yeah, well," she said, pulling her hat off and spilling her hair out over her shoulders, "I'll try not to let it happen again. It's the sex, G, those whatchamacallits, the chemicals you get from orgasms."

"Endorphins," he supplied dryly. He'd given up telling her not to call him 'G' about the time he'd given in on a lot of other things that were rather more important than a somewhat annoying moniker. "You also get them from exercise and eating spicy food."

"Whatever. Our way's more fun."

Watching her comb through the tangles in her hair with her fingers, Giles had to agree. He stared at her openly and she let him, even grinned at him when she caught him at it. It hadn't always been like this; he'd hesitated at the beginning, though it had been painfully obvious what she'd wanted from him ever since that moment in his flat in Bath when she'd put her hand on his chest, curling her fingers into his jumper with a possessiveness that had surprised him. Pleased him as well, if truth be told. But he'd seen her with other lovers, even spoken to Robin briefly when he'd come to fetch her in Cleveland, and he had some self-preservation instincts left to him.

Not enough, though, apparently. It'd taken her less than a week to wear him down. She'd been impressed with his fortitude; he hadn't been. But so far none of what he'd feared had materialized. She was no more or less respectful of him than she'd been previously, though she had an appalling lack of propriety that he suspected her of playing up just to make him blush.

"Well, then," he said, "We should push on. We might catch up to her by morning at this rate, especially if she stops to rest."

Faith didn't answer. She leaned on her own poles and eyed him - or at least Giles thought she did. The moon had slipped behind a cloud and it was pitch black without it, but there was some yellow light coming from up by the road. "Is it supposed to snow again tonight?" she asked at last.

Giles raised his eyebrows. "No, not for a few more days."

Faith nodded, a vague movement in the inky dark. "No, then."

"No, what?"

"No, we're not pushing on. I'm exhausted, Giles, which means you're about to fall over. This chick is not gonna just come quietly when we do catch up with her, and I'd prefer not to be seeing double if I have to clock her in the jaw. We're stopping, at least until morning."

The idea was terribly tempting. "I don't think that would be very wise. By morning she'll be far away."

"Yeah, but her tracks're gonna be right where she left 'em. So we'll be fine."

Giles sighed. "And where do you propose we stay?" He thought longingly of their hotel room in town. It wasn't fancy, but it had a heater and a bed and hot water - any one of which sounded heavenly at the moment. Standing still had been a mistake. He'd broken out in a sweat almost immediately. And he couldn't feel his toes in his boots.

"There's a house up on the road," she said, nodding toward it. Giles hadn't noticed it before, but there it was, a dark, crouching shape blotting out part of the sky.

"There could be someone -"

"Giles, no one is stupid enough to live out on this lake in the winter. Well," she amended, "except maybe the Unabomber, but somehow I don't think this is Unabomber territory."

"We can't just break in - there's probably an alarm -"

"There probably isn't," she countered. "We're in the middle of Bum Fuck Nowhere, Montana, G. How paranoid would you have to be?"

She had a point. He sighed heavily, but he was too cold to keep up the losing end of an argument. "All right."

"Damn straight," she said, and used her pole to unclip her boots from her skis. "God, getting these things off is going to be a fucking religious experience." She bent to gather up her skis. She balanced them on her shoulder and led the way between two lumps that were probably docks when they weren't buried under two feet of snow, then up to the road. Giles cast nervous glances in both directions, but he'd looked at a map of this end of the lake before they'd left and this was a peninsula - water on both sides, and though there were several neighboring houses, he thought Faith was probably right - no one would be out here this time of year.

It was probably too much to hope the hot water or the gas would be turned on, but at least the beds might be made up.

By the time he caught up with her, she was already jimmying the lock on the screen door. "I'll show you 'authority,'" she muttered at it. "Know any authorities with these mad skills?"

"I feel I should point out that I, too, can pick a lock."

The door swung open suddenly, almost smacking him in the face, and Faith did not appear the least bit apologetic. "Whatever. You hot wired a couple cars in your day, raised a couple demons, had a couple orgies. I served time in the pokey. That means I can _never_ be an authority."

Giles raised his eyebrows at the back of her head, but said nothing, merely propping the screen door open against his shoulder. "You got a flashlight?" she said, bending to peer at the lock on the main door. "I can't pick this one in the dark."

"Somewhere," he said, and swung his pack down to rifle through it for a torch. He handed it over and she shined it on the lock, then shoved the miniature screwdriver from her keychain into it. She swore under her breath as she jiggered it about, until at last they both heard a soft _click_ and the door gave way. They both stood still, waiting for the telltale beeping of an alarm, but it seemed Faith was right. The owners depended on the house's isolation as the best possible security, and anyway, Giles was fairly certain no one would leave anything worth stealing in a summer cabin over the winter.

"Lights aren't working," Faith said, flipping a switch off and on.

"We couldn't turn them on anyway. Too big a risk someone might see."

"Who, the Abominable Snow Monster? Chill out, G. Nobody here but us chickens."

"Said the fox in the hen house," Giles muttered. Faith grinned and thumped up the stairs.

Giles didn't follow immediately. He dug the second torch out of the pack and paused in the entryway, shining it about him in small arcs. The house smelled strange - a bit damp and musty, but not unpleasant. It was older than a lot of the other houses on the lake, Giles thought, taking in the 1970s faux wood paneling on the walls. Holding the torch at shoulder height, he investigated the room in front of him, a basement rec area with aging linoleum, a workshop counter lined with basic tools, and two bunk beds folded up against the far wall. Giles laid his skis - and Faith's, since she'd abandoned them outside in favor of exploring upstairs - down on the floor in front of the workshop and then stuck his head into the other downstairs rooms. Two bedrooms, both with - _thank God_ \- made-up beds, a bathroom, and a laundry room. He managed not to trip over the skis as he finally trudged up the stairs.

The second store was mostly a sitting room - sofa, TV, armchairs - and a kitchen with linoleum even more scarred and dented than the floor downstairs. Faith was nowhere to be seen, but her jacket was lying across the sofa and her ski boots were lying in the middle of the floor. Giles picked them up and set them out of the way.

"Bathroom and bedroom," Faith reported, emerging, torch in hand, from a doorway Giles had managed to miss altogether. "Lotsa family photos, heavy on the granddaughters. The bathroom's done up for someone in a wheelchair or something. Wonder where Gramps and Gran are now."

"Er," Giles said, pulling back some curtains to reveal a sliding glass door, just as he'd suspected, that led out onto a deck. "I'd guess they live in town during the winter. I can't imagine that anyone with health problems could live out here full time."

"I can't imagine anyone living out here full time, healthy or not," Faith said. "Jesus, G, I didn't really notice when we were skiing 'cause we were making our own noise, but it's _dead_ out here. Creepy as fuck if you ask me."

"Really?" Giles said, sliding back first the door and then the screen. "I think it's peaceful."

"Like a grave. I've been in cemeteries with more life - or at least unlife - than this place."

Giles didn't answer. The deck was less covered in snow than he'd expected - he supposed it was in the lee of the house and more protected from the elements. Still, there were several inches of untouched, smooth whiteness, and he felt loathe to disturb it. He did anyway; he turned off his torch and stepped carefully out onto the deck and across to the railing. Two flowerpots and a vaguely grill-shaped, snow covered lump hinted at summertime activities, but they were hard to imagine just now. This winter had been a hard one; the lake was frozen solid and covered in snow just as smooth as that of the deck, all the way across to the island just barely visible opposite the house.

Actually, make that almost as smooth.

"Faith," he said.

"What?" she said, hovering in the doorway. She'd turned her own torch off as well and he couldn't make out her face in the dark. "You're not gonna make me come out there, are you? 'Cause I thought the whole point was to get warm, but here you are, standing out in the cold. Dunno about you, but I can think of a whole long list of things I'd rather be doing and they all involve being a lot warmer than I am right now."

"In a moment, but first come here, please."

She blew out an exasperated breath that steamed in the air. "The things I do for you, G," she said. He heard her slide the glass door shut behind her before coming over and tucking herself up under his arm. "What?"

"There," he said, pointing. It was darker than dark out here without the help of the streetlight that illuminated the road on the other side of the house, but the moon was out again, almost directly overhead, and reflecting starkly off the snow. Giles could barely make out a line of - something, nothing more than shadows, really, leading across the frozen lake to the island.

"Guess we know where we'll be headed in the morning," Faith said, nodding.

"Yes," Giles said. "I just hope that ice holds." He imagined it, even though he'd much rather have not - the ice cracking, giving way beneath him or, worse yet, Faith. The water below would be almost as cold and much less forgiving. He thought he could hear it even now, if he stopped and listened, gurgling along beneath the layers of ice and snow. It was the last week of February - still deep in winter, but with the spring thaw not far off. Temperatures had risen this last week. Still, it was well below freezing tonight, and if they got an early start they shouldn't have cause to worry.

"Hey, G," Faith said, tugging at him. "Time for bed. I'm wiped."

Even if she wasn't and was only saying so for his benefit, he definitely was, and so allowed himself be herded back inside. They closed and locked the sliding door again, and then Faith took his hand and led him around the sofa and into the upstairs bedroom. They undressed in almost complete darkness; Giles actually closed his eyes as he pulled his shirt over his head, and listened to the rustle of Faith peeling off her layers. When he was down to his boxers he turned back to the bed, which was covered in a lovely hand-stitched quilt and far too many decorative pillows. He pulled the pillows off in twos and threes, shivering in his undershirt, and then turned down the bed. He wished for a hot water bottle or an electric blanket or just about anything, but he thought it was best to leave everything as undisturbed as possible. At least, he realized with some surprise as he ran his hand over the bed, there were flannel sheets.

"Fuck a duck, it's cold," Faith said, fairly leaping into the bed. Giles caught a glimpse of long legs and flat, pale stomach, and then she was under the covers. He fetched his mobile from the pocket of his trousers and set the alarm before joining her under the soft sheets and delightfully thick duvet.

She burrowed into his side. "Was this or was this not a way better plan than skiing until one of us - and, let's face it, by 'one of us,' I mean you - collapsed and had to be medivacced out of this wicked creepy place?"

Giles knew she couldn't see him, so he didn't even bother to glare. Besides which, he was far too busy enjoying the warmth of Faith's - everything. "Definitely a much better plan," he had to agree, burrowing back despite himself. They'd both left their thick socks on, which at least eliminated the problem of cold feet, and the rest of them would warm up rapidly, as tangled together as they were now. Especially since Faith, it seemed, was determined to get even more tangled, pressing close against him. The sheets smelled clean, cleaner than the ones in their hotel room, and Giles pulled the duvet up and over their heads.

Faith wiggled her way beneath him. "So, G -" she said, with a smirk he couldn't see but could certainly hear in her voice.

"No."

"Aw, G -"

"We've already broken into the house of what I'm sure is a very nice elderly couple. I'm not having sex in their bed."

"We could just -"

"No."

"Or -"

"No. And stop _wiggling_. I'm not to be tempted."

"Well, that was a challenge if I ever heard one," Faith said, and hooked one socked foot over Giles's calf, hitching herself against him. He could feel her smiling at him in the dark and knew this was something he had to head off at the pass. Faith shared more than a few personality quirks with Ethan, and one of the more disturbing (from Giles's point of view) was that, given ten uninterrupted minutes, they could both convince Giles that almost anything was a good idea. He didn't think of himself as particularly suggestible, but he'd done things with Ethan that still made the tips of his ears burn when he thought about them (and that was leaving aside their more idiotic and ultimately tragic escapades with magic). So far Faith hadn't quite persuaded him to such lengths, but then, she hadn't really tried either.

He needed to put a stop to this. Immediately.

He kissed her.

Most people likely wouldn't have called that "putting a stop to it." But Giles knew exactly how to kiss Faith so that everything else ceased to matter and even her rather ham-handed (albeit enthusiastic and usually effective) attempts to seduce him came to a standstill. Giles hadn't believed it was possible until it had actually happened, but he could kiss her until she melted and then she was almost . . . vulnerable. It was what had won him over in the end; until that moment he'd been afraid that they would end in disaster because she would never let her guard down in front of him and possibly think less of him for letting his own down in front of her. It wasn't until he'd kissed her like this, lazy and languid, not chaste (definitely not chaste), but more romantic than sexual, for the first time and felt her melt against him, that he thought they stood a fighting chance. And that was the very least he wanted with Faith. She deserved at least that.

"Mmm," she murmured, and ran a hand down the length of his spine. Giles had to fight not to smile against her lips, as that would have certainly given the game away.

By the time the kiss ended some time later, he had an armful of sleepy, relaxed slayer. He buried his face in the crook of her neck and sighed softly, making her shiver. He felt the temptation then, as he had a few times before, to tell her he loved her, but he didn't. He was always afraid he'd end up sleeping alone - probably for the rest of his life - if he did.

"Giles," she whispered after awhile.

He was more than half-asleep, but he managed a half-hearted, "Mmm?"

"You think she's all right?"

He had to forcibly rouse himself in order to understand exactly who Faith meant. "Oh. I . . ." He paused. "I don't know."

"It's so cold out. And no one for miles."

"I know."

"What if she collapsed or something? Even slayers can't keep going forever. Not in this weather."

Giles shook his head. "I'm sure she'll have the sense to do what we did. Find shelter, someplace to warm up." He was counting on it, in fact, since if she didn't, they were never going to catch up with her, skis or no. Unless Faith's fears were realized and then they'd be much too late.

"Not if she thought we were chasing after her like this." He felt Faith swallow hard. "I wouldn't've. Woulda just kept going till I dropped."

He kissed her temple. "Shh, sleep now, all right? I set the alarm for seven. We'll sleep for a bit and tomorrow we'll find her."

"Yeah? You promise, G?"

"Yes. I promise."

He felt her sigh and relax against him. He lay his head beside hers on the pillow and closed his eyes.

_The woods are lovely, dark and deep.  
But I have promises to keep,  
And miles to go before I sleep,  
And miles to go before I sleep. _

Fin.


End file.
